I have joined, temporarily and at the mildest end of the spectrum, the ranks of the disabled. My pelvis has decided to destabilise itself and so now, instead of leaping nimbly through the day's events like a chamois from crag to crag, I shuffle and hang on to furniture like a toddler with a precocious capacity for swearing.

From previous jobs and a wheelchair-using boyfriend, I wasn't entirely ignorant of the tribulations of life as a person with circumscribed physical capacities. But as with anything, it isn't until you've had a direct, personal experience of a situation (even, as I say, in its mildest form) that you really begin to appreciate its ramifications.

Every day, so much of your physical and mental energy is devoted to simple tasks and manoeuvres. Nothing can be done unthinkingly any more. Tasks must be stacked ready for completion during the next enforced get-up-before-I-seize-up moment. The day is recast not to maximise pleasure, efficiency or deadline-meeting, but to minimise pain and fatigue.

Already my world has shrunk: to the shops within hobbling distance and without steps or weighted doors; to the people who have time and inclination to visit rather than be visited; and to the hours before I am too tired and sore from the struggle and have to go, earlier and earlier, to bed.

Going out unsettles mentally as well as physically, too. There is nothing obviously wrong with me – no swelling, no bruising, no plaster casts – so I feel somewhere between fraud and lunatic as I shuffle along the pavement, muttering imprecations and leaning gracefully into hedges every 50 yards to let the cumulative soreness subside. And I have good and bad days. On good ones, I neck painkillers and feel almost fine, at least until I forget my limitations and do something crazy, such as turn. On bad days, Toryboy has to swing me out of bed, dress me from the waist down and carry me down the stairs. The middle part, for him, is the worst because I haven't shaved my legs in months. "It reminds me," he says with a shudder as he pulls on my socks, "of getting changed for under-12s rugby." I keep feeling a guilty need to explain to those who see me sometimes walking normally and sometimes listing into hedges that I am not putting it on. It just depends on how closely my stupid bones have decided to conform to the traditional arrangement that day. And how much I like the hedge, of course.

This guilt is entirely misplaced, however, because one of the most pleasant revelations of the experience has been how endlessly kind and sympathetic people – strangers – are. Minicab drivers, on whom I rely more and more, help me in and out of their cars. A man on the train held passengers back to allow me enough room and time to alight painlessly. And I can't count the number of offers of help and expressions of concern I've had when I have to pause on the pavement to catch my breath.

It makes me wonder, though: what happens to all this kindness and compassion when we move beyond the individual level? It clearly dissipates at some point. I'm fascinated, truly, by the fact that a government is elected by people and made up of people, yet so lacks the empathy or sympathy of the average person that it can blithely cut the benefits that mitigate the sociocultural disadvantages of disability – the enforced isolation, the extra expense (of minicabs, of having to go to the most accessible rather than the cheapest shops) – and reformulate the rules of qualifying so that it seems every applicant is assumed to be a fraud until proven otherwise.

My condition is, as I say, mild and temporary – thank God. If it were anything else, it looks as if my best option would be to curl up under one of those hedges and wait for a good Samaritan to take pity on me. I know they're out there, but should they really be our last, best hope?